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Speaking of Authors Speaking…

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I gave my first keynote presentation when I was eighteen. Since then, I’ve come up against dang near every minor and moderate issue a presenter might encounter.

As writers, panels, conferences, readings, classes and workshops are likely to come our way. I’m not going to speak here about choosing your topic or material, or outlining and establishing a talk or class (but will later, if folks are interested!). Instead, we’re going to chat about… problems.BookLook

No matter how fantastic the story you’ll be reading or how perfect the PowerPoint you’ve created, the difference between a great presentation—for you and your audience—and a bad presentation doesn’t lie in whether you encounter problems. It depends on how well you face the challenge, crisis, or OH SHIT moment.

We could drill through a score of subcategories and specifics. But we’re going to touch on the three areas most speaking challenges fall under: Technology Is Fickle, Who the Hell Is In Charge, and I Misjudged My Audience.

  1. Technology Is Fickle

Don’t skip this one, thinking your talks are “too small” to involve AV equipment. Electricity falls under “technology,” and the power grid doesn’t care if you have twenty-seven people ready to learn self-defense in a windowless hotel conference room when a lacking-judgement squirrel loses its life to a transformer up the road.

Yep, it happened. Continue reading Speaking of Authors Speaking… →

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No TEDx For Me

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Alas, there shall be no TEDx audition for me. I was cut at the “fill out this form with your idea” stage.

Honestly, I did think I’d at least get an audition. The topic and the credentials I offered–the creative control and opportunities offered by self-publishing–seemed to fit perfectly with their theme of “Make + Believe,” and I’ve over two decades of public speaking and teaching experience. But I must have failed to make it compelling enough at the “query” stage, or perhaps mistook the oddities of the online form as an indication they wanted brevity. (Any form that requires odd key strokes to create paragraphs…)

For whatever reason, I don’t get speak.

*pout*

But since my topic was on the empowerment of self-publishing, the cultural shift happening within the community of writers, and the way readers are embracing the creative diversity… Since I’d intended to speak on the impact of no longer needing to gain third-party permission for one’s creative choices, and the new-found passion so many writers find in creative control…

In that spirit, I figure I’ll write up the presentation and record it myself. It’ll be my NOTx Talk, and be no longer than eight minutes. Why the heck not, yes? 🙂

More to come, as I put the pieces together…